Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty holds that they provide no alternatives and even present progress as problematic at times.

It consists of expanded versions of the three lectures, two appendices ("Movements and Campaigns", "The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature") as well as the notes, acknowledgements, and index.

"[3] The second narrative is equally dispiriting but for a different reason; leftist literature often focuses on what is wrong with America and where there is hypocrisy and actions at odds with avowed ideals, so "When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country ... this insight does not move them to formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national hope.

The essential theme to those novels is that America is not yet achieved, that "the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes.

"[7] Whitman and John Dewey are essential to his discussion because he identifies them as crucial to developing the mythology of an unachieved America which was "ubiquitous on the American Left prior to the Vietnam War.

"[8] Their contribution is a pragmatic twist on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Hegelianism, in which America is eventually a glorious synthesis of all the opposed civilizations and ideas mingling in a democracy.

The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.